In any managed infrastructure environment, such as an information technology (IT) infrastructure environment, one of the challenges is to maintain an accurate representation of the configuration of this environment for the benefit of management functions and processes. This notion is well appreciated among IT professionals and has led to the development of best practices for the representation of configuration item (CI) information in selected management domains. CIs comprise all infrastructure resources that are in under the management of or whose control is governed by an IT service management configuration process. Examples of CIs and CI types include computer systems, operating systems, applications, business services, routers, and switches, printers, etc. A computer system is a CI type: for example, server01.watson.ibm.com and gdil_server—2.watson.ibm.com are CIs instances of type ComputerSystem. CIs are uniquely identified in such environments by the use of naming rules (or keys). For example, in the IT domain one such practice is expressed by the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) in which a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) and a plurality of Configuration Management processes are defined. The CMDB can be either a unified database or a federated database where a collection of databases presents a single user interface. The CMDB stores configuration items (CIs) and their attributes and details about the relationships between CIs. Information that is stored within a CMDB is accessible by one or more system/service management applications to accomplish their task.
One challenge in the realization of such a CMDB is the representation of information from a variety of infrastructure environments that may have overlapping or duplicate keys as a result of systemic considerations in the managed environment. An exemplary environment would one in which Network Address Translation (NAT) is used, resulting in several resources appearing to have the same Internet Protocol (IP) address when inspected (or discovered) within the environment and viewed across the enterprise as a whole. In such circumstances, an enterprise-wide CMDB could be populated by configuration details from a number of resources with undistinguishable keys. This results in data integrity problems within the enterprise-wide CMDB for these configuration items.